Schiaparelli & the artists

René Magritte's famous painting La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images) (1929), with its iconic caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe), inspired Elsa in the creation of her only men's fragrance, Snuff, launched in 1940. The bottle in the shape of pipe is not a real pipe, like its packaging in the shape of a cigar box, which is in reality a perfume case. 

This process illustrated René Magritte's theory that “an object never performs the same function as its name or its image”, as he put it in 1929 in “Les mots et les images” (“Words and Images”), published in the magazine La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution).